Isabelle MurrayComments Off on CfP: The World Congress of Scottish Literatures: University of Nottingham
The World Congress of Scottish Literatures: Call for Papers
The fourth World Congress of Scottish Literatures will be held from the 3rd to the 7th July 2024 at the University of Nottingham in England. The Congress is a major international gathering of scholars with a research interest in the study of all Scottish literatures, across all of Scotland’s languages, with an emphasis on Scotland’s place in the world.
While the fourth World Congress does not have a specific theme, our scope is transnational, and we would especially welcome papers on subjects that reflect the specific context of the Congress in Nottingham: the relationship between Scotland and England from earliest times to the present, a relationship which has had profound implications for the entire world, and which is a significant relationship in literatures in Scots, Gaelic, English, French and Latin from earliest evidence to contemporary production. Under this broad umbrella, we hope to address the following strands:
• Scoto-English relationships: personal, inter-textual, political, cultural and historical
• Scotland in Empire and the Empire in Scotland
• Outlaws, outliers and exiles
• My enemy’s enemy is my friend: Gaelic literary relationships beyond Scotland – Shaped by Landscape: literary understandings of land, sea and the environment – Scottish writing and World Literature
• Scottish medievalisms and the premodern use of the past
• Ultima thule: early Scottish engagements with Europe
• Outward-looking Romanticism
• Post-Couthy: literature in Scots since the Unions
• Drama, theatre and performance
• Contemporary Gaelic literature and media
• Diasporic writing: Scotland in a global world
Proposals for papers, posters and presentations should include an abstract of c. 200 words, and your affiliation. Papers in English, Scots or Scottish Gaelic are welcomed; however, the conference is unable to provide simultaneous translation services for papers not delivered in English.
The deadline for ALL proposal submissions is 31 October 2023.
Francesca KilloranComments Off on On this Day: 16th July 1823 – Byron leaves Italy for Greece to take part in the Greek War of Independence
It was on board the tantalisingly named Hercules that Byron left Italy and sailed for Greece to join the fight for independence. Britain had responded to the war back in the February of 1823 by creating the London Greek Committee in order to help the cause of Greek Independence from the Ottomans. However, Byron had been thinking about Greece not only since the war began in 1821, whilst writing the latest Cantos of Don Juan, but in the much earlier writings of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimages Cantos I-II published in 1812 which was to grant Byron fame and infamy.
Byron’s outspokenness against Britain is evident from his first speech in the House of Lords in December 1812 which described the Tory government as ‘full of ‘bankruptcy, convicted fraud, and imputed felony.’[1] Such less than subtle attacks are applied to Britain in order contrast with the idealised demi-paradise of Ancient Greece, especially Athens, in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimages Cantos I-II:
‘[s]on of the morning, rise! approach you here! / […] [l]ook on this spot-a nation’s sepulchre! [a]bode of gods, whose shrines no longer burn / Even gods must yield.’[2]
From the sunrise a new beginning for Greece and Europe is offered. However, the narrator reminds the reader of the Ottoman occupation of Greece through the description of the Parthenon where at its
‘proud pillars […] the Moslem sits’ (89-90).
Byron’s reimagination of ancient Greece invites the classically educated nineteenth-century reader to consider the immoral nature of such an ancient culture being occupied by non-Christians. But more than this, Byron creates parallels between the Imperialist tendencies of Britain and the ancient city state of Athens which would enforce its will over other Greek allies until the surrender of Athens to Sparta during the Peloponnesian Wars in 404 BC.[3]The classically educated reader identifies anxieties between Britain’s increasing domination of Europe, even before Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo in 1815, and Athens’ domination of the other city states in Greece. This discomfort is amplified through an evocation of Britain’s removal of artefacts from the Parthenon that even the Ottoman Turks had saved:
‘modern Pict’s ignoble boast, / to rive what Goth, and Turk, and Time hath spared’ (100-101).
The controversy surrounding Lord Elgin’s acquisition of the marbles from the Parthenon in Athens between 1803 and 1812, a highly publicised act, is discussed through the historical tribe of the Picts who were present in Scotland and Ireland during Roman occupation of Britain.[4]
History becomes a device through which the narrator creates parallels and criticism of British foreign policy. Byron’s abandoned home of Britain becomes the Imperialist dominator of Greece:
‘[w]hat! shall it e’er be said by British tongue, / Albion was happy in Athena’s tears? […] [t]he ocean queen, the free Britannia, bears / The last poor plunder from a bleeding land’ (109-114).
Britain becomes identified though its Imperialist acquisition of the marbles from the Parthenon. The passing on of Greek artefacts to Britain creates significant parallels between Imperialist Britain’s treatment of modern Greece through its acquisition of the marbles and ancient Athens’ treatment of its Greek allies. The Parthenon’s construction began in 447 BC, the same year that saw the transformation of the Delian league of Greek allies into the beginning of the Athenian Empire under the supervision of Pericles.[5] An educated reader would draw comparisons between the beginning of the Athenian empire and Britain’s potential for Imperialist domination in Europe. Out of this parallel, nineteenth-century Athens is only seen through
‘Athena’s poor remains’ (105)
This negative image of what little remains creates a theme of impermanence towards the Athenian empire which allows the reader to reflect on how early nineteenth-century empires, including the British, can be imagined to fall.
Byron himself would not live to see the independence of Greece in 1830, but his insight into the fall of Imperialism, whether Ancient Athens or Britain, is amongst his most brilliant observations. Such insights may have been overlooked in favour of the more flamboyant and intriguing dalliances of Byron’s life and writing, but the impermanence of empires seems all the more relevant in a post-Imperialist Britain inundated with the need for foodbanks.
Matt Jones
Matt Jones is an MA student at Cardiff University interested in the political radicalism of first and second-generation Romantic writers and their portrayals of Britain and Europe. On completion of his MA, Matt hopes to go on to a PhD that will explore these interests further.
[2] Lord Byron, ‘Canto II’ in Byron’s poetry and prose ed. by Alice Levine and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Byron’s poetry and prose (London: Norton, 2000), pp.55-83; further references to this poem are included in the body of the essay, giving the relevant line numbers in brackets.
[4] Lee Taylor, ‘Elgin Marbles’, An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age (2009)
ed. by Iain McCalman, Jon Mee, Gillian Russell, Clara Tuite, Kate Fullagar, and Patsy Hardy <https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780199245437.001.0001/acref-9780199245437-e-214?rskey=XPFv5x&result=1> [accessed 14th March 2022].
Rosie WhitcombeComments Off on CFP: The English Georgian North, 1714-1830: Rethinking Cultures and Connections
An in-person symposium hosted by Durham University’s Institute of Medieval and Early Modern Studies (IMEMS)
15 September 2023
There will be no registration fee for this event. Teas, coffees, and a light lunch will be provided. ***
This symposium builds on conversations which have been taking place at Durham University over the last fifteen months as part of the IMEMS research strand ‘The Georgian North’, designed and led by Professor Fiona Robertson:
The symposium sets out to develop new approaches to the intellectual and creative cultures of the northern counties of England in the Georgian period, 1714-1830. Important contributions to knowledge, interpretation, creative practice, and scientific advance were made in the north country during this still largely rural and early industrial period in its history. They took shape in social, professional, and discursive networks of considerable complexity and reach, bringing together artists, abolitionists, antiquaries, architects, writers, theologians, musicians, astronomers, philosophers, mathematicians, botanists, landscape designers, linguists, clergy, social and political reformers, actors, and archaeologists. Yet there has been little connected cross-disciplinary exploration of these cultures, their significance, and their legacies.
We invite proposals for 15-minute papers or presentations to contribute to a day of informal and investigative discussion. Topics of interest include, but are not restricted to:
• Environment and conservation
• Abolition, reform, and intervention
• Originality and innovation
• Scientific enquiry, speculation, and new worlds
• Practices of collecting, curation, and display
• Performance: players, theatres, audiences
• Composition: music, painting, poetry, prose fiction, architecture, design • Ancient pasts: theories and artefacts
• Cultures of belief
• Depletion and rediscovery (buildings, communities, habitats, traditions) • International and intercultural connections; connections across languages and traditions
• Conversation and exchange (social, professional, and discursive networks, philosophical and historical societies, bookshops, print cultures)
The region under discussion comprises the historic counties of northern England – County Durham, the North Riding of Yorkshire, Northumberland, Cumberland, and Westmorland. Of particular interest, because especially under-researched, is present-day County Durham and the areas immediately bordering it, but we welcome work on all relevant locales and communities. Of the many individuals active in the intellectual and creative cultures of the period, some were permanently settled in the northern counties, while others were here for shorter periods, often under-researched relative to the wider body of scholarship on their work. They are all of significance to our discussion, as are, also equally, the natural and constructed environments of the northern English counties – private and public buildings, landscapes and treescapes, theatres and observatories. All these environments helped shape the formation and development of ideas and many are now lost or under-regarded.
This is an in-person symposium, open to researchers across disciplines, with papers and roundtables and an emphasis on discussion and exchange. There will be at least one online only follow-up session later in 2023.
We invite 300-word proposals for 15-minute papers or presentations.
If you cannot attend but are interested in receiving information about the Research Strand and follow-up sessions, you can use the above link to register your interest.
We shall respond to all proposal submissions no later than 28 July, after which time further details and the registration link will be made available.
Amy WilcocksonComments Off on Incoming BARS Communications Assistants 2023-24
We received a number of very high quality applications for the BARS Communications Assistant 2023-24 position. The Executive Committee are delighted to announce that there will be two new Assistants working on the BARS Blog and social media in the next academic year:
Isabelle Murray is a Masters graduate from Cardiff University. Her thesis, ‘The Glory of the Flower: the Flora in William Wordsworth’s Ecopoetry’, focuses on the sociality of Wordsworth’s natural world, providing an original colour analysis of the use of yellow in his poetry. Her blog site, LetsTalkRomanticism, seeks to explore modern literature, art, music and film through the lens of British Romanticism. Her first post compares Bruce Springsteen’s discography with the poetry of Wordsworth, ‘I walk Streets of Fire… A few miles above Tintern Abbey’, underlining the potential of Romantic literature as an expansive genre. Follow Isabelle on Twitter here.
Statement: I am thrilled to be a part of the BARS community! I cannot wait to surround myself with others who have such a passion for Romanticism.
Dr Rosie Whitcombe is a writer and academic. She is currently an MHRA Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Sheffield where she is helping to prepare The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ann Radcliffe for publication. She studied for her PhD at Birmingham City University. Her thesis, ‘John Keats and the Literary Letter’, provides a new historical and critical account of Keats as a letter writer, with a particular focus on self-fashioning, theories of the epistolary, and the text as artefact. Her essay, ‘Connection, Consolation, and the Power of Distance in the Letters of John Keats’, won the 2020 Keats-Shelley Essay Prize and was published in The Keats-Shelley Review. She co-runs an educational YouTube channel, ‘Books ‘n’ Cats’, that seeks to disseminate academic literary content to a wider audience. Follow Rosie on Twitter here.
Statement: I’m really pleased to be joining the BARS team! Very much looking forward to working with people dedicated to furthering the reach of Romantic studies.
More on our plans for this academic year very soon! Keep an eye on our Twitter page and Facebook group for how you can be involved and contribute to the BARS Blog.
With massive thanks to Francesca Killoran, our outstanding Communications Assistant for 2022-23.
Amy WilcocksonComments Off on Stephen Copley Research Awards 2023 (Round One): Awardees Announced
The BARS Executive Committee established the Stephen Copley bursary scheme in order to support postgraduate and early-career research within the UK. The bursaries primarily fund expenses incurred through travel to libraries and archives necessary for the applicant’s research, alongside other research-focused costs, such as (but not limited to) photocopying, scanning, and childcare. Please do join us in congratulating the very worthy winners and their projects:
Elisa Cozzi (Oxford) – ‘Italy and the Irish Romantics: Networks, Nations, and Literary Encounters 1798– 1848’
Ella Morrish (York) – ‘Materiality and Mourning in British Women’s Poetry of the Romantic Period’
Serena Qihui Pei (UCL) – ‘Thomas Manning and his Chinese Book Collection: Rethinking Sinological Influence on the Romantic Circle’
Dr Honor Rieley (Edinburgh) – ‘Newspaper Literature and the Provincial Perspective in Scotland and the North of England, 1820–40’
Once they have completed their research projects, each winner will write a brief report. These reports will be published on the BARS Blog and circulated through our social media. For more information about the bursaries, including reports from past winners, please visit our website: www.bars.ac.uk.
Amy WilcocksonComments Off on BARS President’s Fellowship 2024 – Open for Applications
In June 2020, the British Association for Romantic Studies announced its unequivocal support of the Black community, its condemnation of all forms of racism and its commitment to practical action. In response to the enduring and systemic damage caused by racism, the BARS Executive commenced a programme of initiatives focused on the histories and literatures of People of Colour. Among these initiatives is the BARS President’s Fellowship, which was officially announced at the 2021 summer virtual conference, Romantic Disconnections/Reconnections.
The President’s Fellowship is open to scholars from Black, Indigenous and other minority ethnic backgrounds working on any aspect of Romantic Studies to support research, teaching and/or public outreach expenses of up to £1500. Expenses may include, but are not limited to, costs emerging from: travel and accommodation for research-focused or archival visits; photocopying and digitisation; caring commitments; producing and circulating teaching resources; organising and delivering public outreach activities; setting up and running networks or collaborations; set-up and maintenance costs for online platforms such as blogs and websites.
BARS invites applications from postgraduate, early career and independent scholars. Awards will be made based upon the significance and relevance of the project rather than upon the career status or affiliation of the applicant. A postgraduate must be enrolled on a doctoral programme; an early career scholar is defined here as someone who holds a PhD but has held a permanent academic post for less than five years by the application deadline. Application for the award is competitive and cannot be made retrospectively. Applicants are encouraged to consider applying for the maximum amount, if appropriate, although applications below the threshold will not adversely affect the judgement of the awarding panel. Please indicate any relevant existing funding – match funding (whether cash or in-kind) will be looked upon positively. We anticipate awarding one President’s Fellowship in any given year; in exceptional circumstances, additional awards may be made. Successful applicants need not be based in the UK, but must be members of BARS before taking up the award.
The inaugural 2023 President’s Fellowship awardee was Ifemu Yaa Omari (University of Wolverhampton), for a project on Mary Prince. For a write-up of Ifemu’s award, see here.
Please download and complete the linked form when applying for this scheme.
The name(s) of the recipient(s) will be announced on the BARS website and social media, and the awardee or awardees will be asked to submit a short report to the BARS Executive Committee within four weeks of the completion of all related activities and to acknowledge BARS in relevant publicity, including publications. Reports may also be published on the BARS Blog where this is appropriate.
Applications and informal queries should be directed to the Bursaries Officer, Dr Gerard McKeever (gerard.mckeever@ed.ac.uk) at the University of Edinburgh. If you require further guidance about the funding aspects of the scheme, please feel free to contact the Treasurer, Dr Cassie Ulph (bars.treasurer@gmail.com). There will be one round of the BARS Presidential Fellowship in each calendar year: the closing date for the 2024 round will be 5pm on Friday, 10 November 2023. In usual circumstances, applicants will be informed of the panel’s decision within four weeks of this closing date. It is anticipated that the successful applicant(s) would take up their award as close to the commencement of 2024 as practicable.
Amy WilcocksonComments Off on BARS Open Fellowship 2024 – Applications Welcome
We are delighted to announce that, in addition to our established BARS funding streams – most of which are limited to early career and postgraduate applicants – this year we are launching a new scheme open to our entire membership: the Open Fellowship.
The Open Fellowship is available to scholars at any career stage undertaking exceptional work at the forefront of Romantic studies to support research expenses of up to £2000. Expenses may include, but are not limited to, costs emerging from: travel and accommodation for research-focused or archival visits; photocopying and digitisation; caring commitments; producing and circulating teaching resources; organising and delivering public outreach activities; setting up and running networks or collaborations; set-up and maintenance costs for online platforms such as blogs and websites.
Awards will be made based upon the significance and relevance of the project rather than upon the career status or affiliation of the applicant. Application for the award is highly competitive and cannot be made retrospectively. Applicants are encouraged to consider applying for the maximum amount, if appropriate, although submitting applications below the threshold will not adversely affect the judgement of the awarding panel. Please indicate any relevant existing funding – match funding (whether cash or in-kind) will be looked upon positively. We anticipate awarding one Open Fellowship in any given year; in exceptional circumstances, additional awards may be made. Successful applicants need not be based in the UK, but must be members of BARS before taking up the award.
Please download and complete the linked form when applying for this scheme.
The name(s) of the recipient(s) will be announced on the BARS website and social media, and the awardee or awardees will be asked to submit a short report to the BARS Executive Committee within four weeks of the completion of all related activities and to acknowledge BARS in relevant publicity, including publications. Reports may also be published on the BARS Blog where this is appropriate. Applications and informal queries should be directed to the Bursaries Officer, Dr Gerard McKeever (gerard.mckeever@ed.ac.uk) at the University of Edinburgh. If you require further guidance about the funding aspects of the scheme, please feel free to contact the Treasurer, Dr Cassie Ulph (bars.treasurer@gmail.com). There will be one round of the BARS Open Fellowship in each calendar year: the closing date for the 2024 round will be 5pm on Friday, 10 November 2023. In usual circumstances, applicants will be informed of the panel’s decision within four weeks of this closing date. It is anticipated that the successful applicant(s) would take up their award as close to the commencement of 2024 as practicable.
1) How did you first become interested in edible things in the long eighteenth century?
I remember being taken by eighteenth-century literature’s tendency to exhaustively detail every item on the menu when it comes to the depiction of Oriental banquets. The Greek dinner scene in Lord Byron’s Don Juan, with which my book begins, is one of the more famous instances, but examples like it abound in literature from the period and trace back to the Arabian Nights story cycle. There had been critical work on the function of the epic catalogue in British Orientalism, but not as much (with the exception of Timothy Morton’s The Poetics of Spice) on the particular significance of the cataloging of edible things. On the one hand, these culinary lists provided readers with a sensory experience of the Orient. On the other hand, the conventionality of the rhetorical gesture seemed to subvert the very materiality invoked by the listing of edible things. This tension between words and things that the literary text itself was foregrounding, even interrogating, was what drove my interest. I think there is a scholarly tendency to see imperial commodities in literature as opaque archives that must be illuminated by the present-day critic, whose job it is to investigate the histories of production, distribution, and consumption of such commodities. But I found the representation of edible things in long eighteenth-century literature a lot more self-reflexive than hitherto acknowledged, and I began to wonder why, and to what end.
2) How did you come to select tea and opium as the major foci for your book?
In the British context, tea and opium are arguably the two ingestible foreign commodities that underwent the most dramatic cultural transformation, so they foreground the kind of tension between the symbolic and the material that I am particularly interested in. Tea was the “China liquor” whose cultural taint British commentators worried about during the eighteenth century, but by the nineteenth century, it had become an icon of English national identity. Opium exhibited an inverse trajectory: while it was never domesticated, Thomas De Quincey could in the 1820s still paint a conceivable portrait of an English opium-eater, but as the century wore on, the drug was increasingly marked “Chinese” even though large amounts were produced in British India. There have of course been major studies on the material and literary circulations of each of these two commodities, but my book focuses on their symbolic entanglement and argues that the two need to be considered as a dialectical pair. Understood in relation to each other, the symbolic fluidities of tea and opium provide a paradigmatic framework for understanding how the consumption and reception of exotic edibles more broadly nurtured a self-reflexive Orientalism that was central to the formation of British imperial identity.
3) Which tropes are most common in self-reflexive literary engagements with exotic ingestants, and what’s your favourite atypical example from your book?
Many of the scenes of ingestion I examine in the book equate edible things with inscriptions, stories, dreams, spells, fantasies, and other forms of meaning making. Literary treatments of tea, for instance, frequently entail discussions of gossip around the tea-table. In Oliver Goldsmith’s The Citizen of the World, “Bear’s claws” and “Birds nests” refer to specific dishes while also functioning as metaphors for exotic reading materials. In Walter Scott’s The Talisman, the eponymous “talisman” – defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as an occult object that derives magical power from the characters with which it is engraved – is used to name the opiate administered by Saladin. In each of these instances, the material effects of the edible thing are inseparable from the discursive apparatus that diagnoses or otherwise makes sense of those effects. One notable exception is Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit, where Flora Finching’s imaginations of China are sharply contrasted with her hearty appetite. The novel makes a point of underscoring the gap between the material and the symbolic and suggests that imperial propaganda works by passing one off as the other. In my book, I explain what the atypical example of Little Dorrit tells us about the shift in British imaginations of the Orient (and of China more specifically).
4) Your chapters trace a ‘historical narrative of Britain’s ongoing creation of imperial selfhood’. What would you identify as the most crucial turning points in this narrative?
Historians have pointed to the crucial role that exotic commodities played in driving the eighteenth-century consumer revolution. My book argues that the intersection between literary Orientalism and exotic consumerism during this time created, among British writers, a self-reflexive engagement with the Orient that was central to the formation of Britain’s imperial identity. The two Opium Wars, beginning in 1839 and ending in 1860, marked a shift away from such self-reflexive engagements toward a more uncritical, xenophobic othering of the East that was further consolidated by mid-century exhibitions such as the 1851 Great Exhibition. Alongside the decline of such self-reflexivity, I noticed in British Orientalist texts a concomitant replacement of the ingestion trope with one of vision, which I connect to the emergence of the “Barbarian eye” as a salient figure in public discourse during the Opium Wars.
5) What new projects are you currently working on?
I’m continuing to think about the relationship between empire and culture, but have started developing these interests within the fields of media and contemporary popular culture. My current project focuses on South Korean popular culture, particularly what its global ascendency means for the creation of hybrid cultural identities. Recently, for Post45 Contemporaries, I edited a cluster of essays on the phenomenon of the Korean Wave and its implications for the development of a global cultural studies. I also have an article forthcoming with the International Journal of Communication that looks at Squid Game and Netflix in order to consider how alternative structures of feeling in South Korean television challenge American narrative ideologies. These inquiries form part of a broader book project on the cultural and transcultural logics of South Korean television and film genres.
Amy WilcocksonComments Off on ‘Am I a Woman or a Slave?’ A formidable event supported by BARS President’s Fellowship Scheme – Ifemu Omari
Two decades ago, I discussed the idea of doing a PhD on Mary Prince with a Senior Lecturer from a Russell Group university. “It’s already been done.” he retorted. And then, a little more spirited, he said, “There’s something I want to show you.” I swivelled in his direction on the chair in his small book-crammed office. He opened two large doors to reveal ceiling-to-floor of spine-bound brown books. “This is where PhDs end up”, the Doctor of Philosophy concluded glibly. A few days later, he sent me an essay on Mary Prince written by one of his students, published on the University’s website. I was highly critical of the essay’s central argument but had neither the language nor the platform to challenge it.
Fast forward to 2019 when my PhD supervisor at the University of Wolverhampton, Ben Colbert, drew my attention to the BARS Stephen Copley Award. I carefully read the brief and informed Ben that, “I can’t see myself in this.” Ben assured me that I would be fine and much to my surprise, I won the award which took me to the Mitchell Library in Glasgow to investigate the archives of the pro-slavery journalist, James MacQueen. Consequently, I presented a paper in the NASSR/BARS conference in August 2022 called ‘Antics and Theatrics: British and West Indian newspaper/periodical (Re)presentations of Mary Prince’.
I often describe my PhD journey as a dense forest in which I have created a path but as I walk down the route I have carefully constructed, the path, almost of its own accord, branches out in different directions. This tests my discipline to stay on track. Occasionally, I find a tangential lane irresistible – I tell myself that I’m not changing directions, just modifying the shape of the path a little. Such was the case when I saw the invitation to apply for a new BARS award. Besides (I told myself) opportunities rarely appear in a timely fashion and the Mary Prince website – my main reason for applying for the BARS President’s Fellowship – had been at the back of my mind for some time.
As an African Caribbean scholar, I am keenly aware that since Britain’s clumsy attempts to dismantle the infrastructural evidence of chattel slavery and colonisation, this sceptred isle has been uneasy with itself and its relationship with the Caribbean ‘other’. I am also acutely mindful of the fragmentation and the invisibilities of African Caribbean histories which lead me to continually examine my own role as a black scholar.
Since beginning my PhD research, I have observed a number of historical milestones – the Windrush scandal (2018); the Covid pandemic (2020 onwards); the murder of George Floyd (May 2020) and the international protests which followed led by Black Lives Matter (BLM). These events have intensified my self-scrutiny as a black scholar in the academic spaces within which I interact.
In addition to global protests from America to Japan and from Brazil to Israel, George Floyd’s murder sparked a spate of activity and conscientisation world-wide. For instance, in July 2020 all the top 10 books on the New York Times’s bestseller list were about racism. And closer to home, Bernardine Evaristo’s novel Girl, Woman, Other and Reni Eddo-Lodge’s book, Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race became the first books by British black women to top the UK’s fiction and non-fiction paperback charts, respectively. The businesses of many of my friends who worked in HR and Diversity thrived from a surge in soul-searching by institutions all over Britain. I was asked to run courses in Decolonising the Curriculum but like many of my HR consultant friends, my optimism was short-lived; complaints amounted to the same weary conclusion: “They’re still not listening”. My decolonisation courses were poorly attended – they had been quickly added to educational programmes with little thought about objectives, publicity and so on. But at least the establishments had put them on – Tick!
Even before the public murder of George Floyd, this experience of institutional short-termism was all-too common amongst black professionals like me. I have concluded a long time ago that often white institutions do not listen with the intention of gaining new knowledge and to consider how they will adjust their central position in response. They, especially universities, owing to their long-established position of power through the dispensation and validation of knowledge, believe in their own superiority. Consequently, new knowledge serves to reinforce their elevated sense of selves and high positions in society and further entrenchment of their dominant culture. This is epitomised in the oft paraded statement that universities are ‘custodians of knowledge.’
BARS has reawakened some kind of hope that all may not be lost with ‘the custodians of knowledge’. Having only attended one BARS conference and interacted with BARS members, I believe that the organisation’s soul-searching long pre-dated the events of May 2020. For me, BARS is a scholars’ community who is always asking questions. Not only did the BARS President’s Fellowship scheme appeal to people of colour but I was also attracted to the award’s openness; the elasticity of the remit evidenced that BARS want to listen, want to grow with its membership and because of its membership – in short, to be relevant. So, I had no hesitation in applying.
Everything about my vision to create and launch a website during Women’s International week, aimed at local community access was realised on Monday March 6 at 2pm at the Arena Theatre in Wolverhampton. My event, ‘Am I a Woman or a Slave; the Formidable Layers of Mary Prince’, sold out twice on Eventbrite. The audience from the Windrush generation and younger, non-academics and scholars gathered in one space and discussed issues which arose from my presentation about Mary Prince’s narrative, The History of Mary Prince; A West Indian Slave Related by Herself. Choreographer Aderonke Fadare and her dance troupe performed an original piece interpreting the Mary Prince story. I also devised WomanChat – a panel of African Caribbean women who responded from their own perspectives to my presentation and Aderonke’s dance performance. These brilliant women chaired by Ruth Minott were as follows: Nicola Taylor Brown, a PhD researcher in Criminology and Women; Pat Clarke, chief executive of the Sandwell African Caribbean Mental Health Foundation; Kerensa Hodges, an MA student in Artificial Intelligence, Dr Nneoma Otuegbe, researcher in Black women’s fiction, and our choreographer, Aderonke Fadare. This was followed by a Q and A.
Ruth and Ifemu
Mayor Sandra Samuels opened the event. She was the first black woman to have held the post in Wolverhampton. So, it was apposite that she delivered the keynote speech about Mary Prince, the first black woman to have had her slave narrative published. Mayor Samuel’s closing remarks in her warm speech, were simple and resonant – ‘Take care of yourselves’.
Mayor Samuels and her husband with Ifemu
When I cast my mind back to 2004, I now imagine that my retort to the glib response “It’s already been done” should have been “Shakespeare’s works are four centuries old but he’s still being done”. And as a custodian of my own knowledge, I continue to tread gently through the dense forest which is my PhD, taking care to value, validate and valorise the scattered fragments of our diasporic African Caribbean literary histories.
I would like to thank Dr Helen Davies, my supervisor who supported my application and Dr Nicola Allen; Professor Sebastian Groes who supported an additional application to the University of Wolverhampton’s Centre for Transcultural and Transnational Research (CTTR) – this grant paid for Aderonke and her dancers. I would like to thank BARS for making me feel that I belong with this thriving scholars’ community, and naturally, I am very grateful to have been made the first recipient of the President’s Fellowship. And of course, I am ever grateful to my supervisor Dr Ben Colbert who ‘saw me’ when I couldn’t see myself in this scholastic space. Nuff Respect, Ben!
Aderonke Fadare, dancer and choreographer
Ifemu Omari is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Wolverhampton. Her research explores the paratextual apparatus around the slave narrative The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave (1831). Ifemu is passionate about public engagement with diverse and non-academic communities. Examples of this are: ‘The Whip-In Conversation with Juliet Gilkes Romero’, (on-line interview, October 2020); ‘This Book Was Not Meant For Us – A Fresh Look at the History of Mary Prince’, (on-line presentation, November 2021); ‘From Struggle to Freedom’ – A series of weekly seminars at the Sandwell African Caribbean Mental Health Foundation (in person, Oct – Dec, 2021); ‘The Uses of Literature: Arts, Culture and Wellbeing in Times of Crisis’ (in-person panellist, April 2022); ‘The Big Book Review: Reviewing Shakespeare’ (in-person presentation with Prof. Sebastian Groes, May 2022); ‘An Interactive Pictorial Seminar of Memories, Fun and a few explorations based on the Lonely Londoners by Sam Selvon’ (in-person presentation, June 2022). She taught Literature for 14 years at Fircroft College, Birmingham and has also taught Literature at the Universities of Birmingham and Wolverhampton. She was shortlisted for the BBC Radio 3/AHRC New Generation Thinkers’ scheme (2021).
For more about the BARS President’s Fellowship, see the link below:
Amy WilcocksonComments Off on Stephen Copley Research Report: Fiona Doxas on Mary Shelley’s Manuscripts
As has been done for Percy Shelley, Coleridge, Kant, Keats and others besides, my doctoral dissertation at Oxford assembles a comprehensive metaphysical system out of its various and sometimes fragmentary manifestations in Shelley’s early published writings.
Mary Shelley
While the majority of relevant manuscripts are held at the Bodleian, my last chapter has necessitated a search beyond my institution’s holdings in order analyze popular conceptions of Frankenstein for potential patterns that may account for Shelley’s changes to the 1831 edition. Thus far, I have found that adaptations tend to shift away from the novel’s arguments on promethean creation in in favor of its themes of monstrosity, madness, and hubris. This shift in popular interpretations of Frankenstein parallels Shelley’s changes to the 1831 edition, which both absorbs the adaptations of her work into their source material and attempts to emphasize the disparity between original and copy. Surprisingly, the first stage adaptation of Frankenstein (most likely never performed) was written in 1821 in France. The manuscript of this sole dramatized Frankenstein not even potentially influenced by Richard Brinsley Peake’s Presumption; or, The Fate of Frankenstein (1823) is held in the BNF in Paris. Thanks to the funds provided by the Stephen Copley Research Grant I was able to spend five days consulting this, and two other relevant manuscripts held at the BNF:
cote : MS Taylor-253 (Frankenstein ou Le Prométhée moderne. Mélodrame en trois actes à spectacles, tiré du roman de Mme Shelley)
cote : Rondel-Ms-613 (Le monstre et le magicien)
cote MS-DOUAY-1880 (Le Docteur magicien : pantomime en 1 acte)
Thanks to the Stephen Copley Research Award, I was able to reserve, peruse, and transcribe what the online descriptions gave me to understand were two completed scripts and one brochure. (In actuality, it was one completed script, one incomplete draft of a script never to be completed and one very detailed completed pantomime script, if script is the right word for such a thing). The first, a draft of 24-27 pages depending on what you count as a page of script, is the only direct adaptation of the three consulted documents. Written in August of 1821 it predates the habit that potentially originates with Presumption of making the Creature mute. The choice to skip over the chapters detailing the Creature’s creation and to begin instead after the trial and sentencing of Justine (who is not Justine but cousin Elizabeth, who is not engaged to Victor), results in a first act largely devoted to the Miltonic dialectic between creature and creator lost in later adaptations such as Presumption. The fact that Shelley, who never in her journals or letters criticized this adaptation but did compliment it, did not alter her Creature and the, some have accused, lengthy back and forth between him and Victor in the 1831 edition, suggests the Creature’s ability to speak and his meeting with his creator are integral to her metaphysical system as it emerges in Frankenstein.
The second and third documents, one a drama titled le Monstre et le magician (1826) and the other a pantomime called le Docteur magicien (1880/1881) were most likely never seen by Mary Shelley, but they do illustrate the Faustian tone that readers recognized in her novel and was emphasized in its earlier stage adaptations. As the monster is mute in these adaptations and therefore unable to provide the promise with the devil most easily associated with Faust, the character is augmented by un grande diable daneaux in the pantomime and a genie in the drama. All three adaptations make a point to root Victor Frankenstein’s quest for the principle of life in a desire for fame and glory, a point absent in the 1818 and 1831 editions of the novel but that is often used in summation of its plot: ambition as downfall.
I would like to thank the Award committee again for their support of my research, both financially and through written encouragement beyond the acceptance letter. I encourage everyone to apply and take advantage of this excellent opportunity.
A. Fiona Doxas enjoys what promises to be a lifelong obsession with Mary Shelley and her work. Currently, she is undertaking a DPhil at Oxford titled “‘Embodied Spirit’: Mary Shelley’s Metaphysical System.” It is proving difficult but rewarding.
